How to restore deleted files/fix zip file Options

[Maccabee]

I cant believe what i have just done!
I had a folder that had about 15gb of vital files and I put them all into a zip file. I never opened the zip file and I deleted the folder with all the files. It told me they were to big to fit in the recycle bin so it deleted them permanently.
I then went to open the xip file and had the biggest shock of my life.
I got the warning: The compressed (zipped) Folder is invalid or corrupted.
I cant believe it. Worst of all they werent my files! They were my brothers! I tried a system restore to earlier that day, but no luck. Is there anything I can do! I think I might die/or be killed if I dont get those files back!

[emberfly]

[illriginal]

lol

As for your problem... OP. I wish I could help you but I'm not in the mood to spend 5 days tryin to assist you. System restore normally works but if you already restored your system to a previous restore point, you just made it even worse. Good luck.

If you were in Linux, once you delete it from the trash can... it's gone forever.

[mipadi]

You may be able to recover the file using an undelete utility. Here's why:

1. When you create a file, the OS makes an entry in the file system's allocation table that specifies a number of things, such as the size of the file, its creation times, its permissions, and the actual location of the first block of data on the disk.
2. Then the OS writes the data to the disk.
3. When you delete a file, the OS removes the entry from the allocation table, but it doesn't actually delete the the data from the disk. The OS just "forgets" that the file exists, so it can re-use the physical, on-disk blocks sometime in the future.

So if you catch your mistake in time, it's usually pretty easy to recover the file using an undelete utility. I'm not familiar with such utilities in Windows-land, but a quick Google search should turn up an appropriate undelete utility for Windows.

Now, if you've used the system for "a while", it's possible that another file may have been written to the disk in the same physical blocks; in that case, you're out of luck.

System restore normally works but if you already restored your system to a previous restore point, you just made it even worse. Good luck.

Nah. System restore isn't a way to recover lost user files. System restore only deals with system files, and won't even touch user files.

If you were in Linux, once you delete it from the trash can... it's gone forever.

Nah. Deleting (unless you use a utility like shred) only removes a file's entry from the file system directory; it doesn't do anything with the data on disk, so it's possible to recover lost files with an undelete utility, if the actual blocks on the disk haven't been written over yet.

[illriginal]

Nah. Deleting (unless you use a utility like shred) only removes a file's entry from the file system directory; it doesn't do anything with the data on disk, so it's possible to recover lost files with an undelete utility, if the actual blocks on the disk haven't been written over yet.

lol what?... you can't recover files on ext3 file system... sorry bud. Ext2 it's possible assuming you don't continue to write onto the hard drive, using a program like "recover".

[mipadi]

lol what?... you can't recover files on ext3 file system... sorry bud. Ext2 it's possible assuming you don't continue to write onto the hard drive, using a program like "recover".

Nope. Ext3 doesn't work fundamentally different from Ext2 in terms of file deletion, and at any rate, Linux file systems work essentially identically when it comes to actions like removing a file. In a nutshell, the bytes stay on the disk; only the record of the file in the allocation table is removed.

(In fact, to say "Linux file systems work essentially identically" is an understatement; virtually all file systems on all operating systems do basically the same thing when "deleting" a file.)

The cool thing about the Linux kernel is that you don't even need to believe me -- you can check it out for yourself. Download the kernel source code and take a look. Relevant source code is in $LINUX_SRC/fs/ and $LINUX_SRC/fs/ext3/. (If you're currently using a Linux system, you don't even need to download the source, because you already have it -- just poke around in /usr/src/linux/.)

If you just want a brief overview, here are the slides for a presentation on ext2/ext3 that I gave a few months ago. There's a section that shows what happens when a file is deleted in ext2. (ext3 is, for all intents and purposes, just ext2 with journaling features.)